The story is, indeed, rather complicated - and the scale of complications is enormous.
THE CAFÉ DE PARIS IN 1843įrom an engraving by Bosredon (public domain) I realize that nothing about this story is going to be simple. Yet it would be unfair to label one group “villains” and another “victims” in this drama. They have a strong sense of tradition and family life.Īs the workers bring in the harvest, I ponder the irony that, once processed, these beans will travel thousands of miles to give pleasure to people who enjoy a lifestyle beyond the imagination of these Guatemalan laborers. The workers are in many ways more content and fulfilled than their counterparts in the United States. Yet there is no quick fix to the inequities built into the economic system, nor any viable alternatives to coffee as a crop on these mountainsides. Land distribution is lopsided, and those who perform the most difficult labor do not reap the profits. In Guatemala, the contrast between poverty and wealth is stark. A good adult picker can harvest over two hundred pounds of cherries and earn $8 a day, more than twice the Guatemalan minimum daily wage. Some of the women carry babies in slings around front. Tiny women carry amazingly large bags, twice their eighty-pound weight. Eaton, 1922 (public domain)Īnd yet beneath this romanticized vision of communal exuberance lies the harsh reality of thankless work on an incredibly labor-intensive crop - this vignette, in fact, is emblematic of coffee’s baked-in paradoxes: Coffee Arabica: leaves, flowers, and fruit I sing a song with a few Spanish phrases: mi amor, mi corazón.
This is a happy time, when the year’s hard work of pruning, fertilizing, weeding, tending, and repairing roads and water channels comes down to ripe coffee. I hear other harvesters - whole families of them - chatting and singing in Spanish. In some cases where the soil lacks sufficient boron, I might have found only one bean, called a peaberry, considered by some to possess a slightly more concentrated taste. Spitting out the parchment, I finally get the two beans, which are covered by a diaphanous silver skin. Like peanuts, coffee beans usually grow in facing pairs. It takes a bit of tongue work to get down to the tough-skinned parchment protecting each bean. I pop the skin of a ripe coffee cherry open in my mouth and savor the sweet mucilage. In a recently released updated edition, Pendergrast paints a beautiful backdrop to the story at a Guatemalan coffee planation 4,500 feet above sea level:
It may have taken a Founding Father to teach Americans how to make it, it wasn’t until Mark Pendergrast’s 1999 book Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World ( public library) that coffee’s rich legacy and anthropology came into full bloom. Coffee - from its artful preparation to its secret history - holds enormous cultural mesmerism as the world’s favorite psychoactive drug.
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